In the Shallows Of The Deep State.

But is there anything there?

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There are expressions that creep up on you when you are not looking, that come from nowhere, and seem to take over the media all at once. The latest, and the subject of this week’s essay is the “Deep State.” Up-to-date dictionaries usually contain such definitions as this, from the Collins:

“a group of senior civil servants and military officials believed by some to exert secret control over its country's government.”

Most dictionaries go on to remind us that the expression has been used for some time now, to refer to the way that power is held and exercised in countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where networks of power certainly exist behind, and in some cases above, the formal state and government. If you are familiar with those countries or similar ones, then this definition makes a degree of sense. In all of those countries, the Army is an independent power that also controls the intelligence services, and its retired personnel are active in politics and business. Family, Clan, Promotion and Regimental links can also be important. Typically, these are countries which are or have been dictatorships, or which have suffered military coups, or where a one-party state linked to an independence movement has been in power for a long time. A good example is Algeria, where the remains of the FLN and the Army still effectively run the country, or Rwanda, where Kagame and those colleagues of his who have not yet been murdered control fundamentally everything, irrespective of elections.

But what about the West? The “Deep State” meme seems to have begun after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. It referred initially to groups of government professionals unhappy with his election, then groups actively trying to frustrate his policies, then organised attempts to stop him being re-elected in 2020, then groups allegedly behind assassination attempts against him, and finally groups planning a full-scale uprising were he to succeed in 2024. The same “Deep State” has more recently been held responsible for a whole series of alleged assassinations in the US, and now even abroad, and indeed to have international branches and affiliates everywhere, overthrowing and installing governments and starting and stopping wars. Just this morning I also saw it suggested that it also controls the “mainstream media.” There’s clearly not a lot that it doesn’t control, therefore, and it is familiarly presented as though its main characteristics were known, presumably with its own Internet site and Facebook page, no doubt advertising for staff on LinkedIn.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, few if any senior figures in the “Deep State” have ever been identified by name or function. There is no agreement about what its activities are, what its objectives are, how it works or how in practice it exerts this apparently impressive degree of control. Whilst it is held to be responsible for, for example, the Ukraine crisis by some, the crisis in Gaza by others and the flare-up of violence in Syria by still others, exactly how this is the case, and who is in charge, and what the objectives are, are all completely obscure. A consequence of this is that the hypothesis can never be refuted, since the “Deep State” can be anything you want it to be, according to the context. In fairness, it must also be said that few who refer casually to the “Deep State” show any awareness of how states in general work at all, still less the most sensitive areas of them. Which is not surprising, given that the number of people in the Anglo-Saxon world competent to talk about the functioning of these sensitive areas from personal experience probably doesn’t exceed the number qualified to talk about quantum physics.

So I thought it might be helpful to do two things. One is to look at the political, social and cultural reasons why this meme—irrespective of how far it is founded in reality—has suddenly become ubiquitous and so much discussed. The other is to look at how states actually work in practice, and to try to see how the way these activities are described in the media gives rise to such hypotheses. With luck, I may even be able to draw some tentative conclusions.

Most people with any historical awareness will immediately have realised the antecedents of this meme, which go back a very long way in popular culture. As I’ve suggested before, and as I hope to set out at greater length in a forthcoming essay, the way that we think and speak about world events, and the way the media write about them, depend more than anything else on the choices we make between competing models of popular culture narratives. In this case, the narrative is of a powerful but hidden group of mysterious individuals, controlling the destiny of countries, or even mankind, and manipulating nations and governments as well as the currency markets and the world economy.

Historically, this manipulation does not have to be malign: indeed, there’s a powerful popular culture stereotype (drawn ultimately from the Protestant concept of a just God arranging everything in human affairs for the best), that sees a hidden but benevolent group watching over the destiny of the world. So the Theosophical tradition has its Ascended Masters from Jesus onwards (and sometimes from as long ago as Atlantis) who remain incarnate to direct the affairs of the world towards positive ends. This tradition, more recently mixed with benevolent visitors from other worlds arriving in UFOs, is behind literally hundreds of books, films, and TV series of the last century or so.

But the more usual manifestation of this trope is in conspiracies, and of course where we talk of the “Deep State” our ancestors wrote similarly about the Freemasons, the Jews and the Bolsheviks, although the progress of history and the changing rules of acceptable discourse exile such assertions nowadays to the comments sections of peripheral internet sites. If you have the stomach to wade through it, there’s an entire tradition of Deep-State-like literature going back to at least the eighteenth century, and a number of respectable academic studies. As as is the case today, most writers happily used the cui bono argument: thus, the French Revolution led ultimately to the emancipation of the Jews in France, therefore …. Meanwhile the mysterious threatening visits by the Men in Black seem to have started again.

However, interest in these allegations has waxed and waned over time, often in interesting ways, just as the number of UFO scares and sightings have followed quite noticeable fluctuations, with variations and evolutions in what the craft are taken to be, and what their intentions are. At the moment, both UFO sightings and hypotheses of a “Deep State” seem to be on the upsurge, which suggests there may be a connection of a kind between them.

The most widely accepted explanation holds that beliefs in both occult and mysterious forces prosper during times of stress and uncertainty, and reflect the need to find patterns, and even hope, in frightening and disconnected events. There is quite a lot of empirical support for this hypothesis: in the confusion and uncertainty after World War 1, for example, not only were theories about mysterious conspiracies found everywhere, but all sorts of esoteric cults flourished as never before. The same is surely true today. Not that long ago, it would have seemed incomprehensible that tens of thousands of European teenagers would travel to Syria to risk violent death in the service of a millennialist cult which believed that ancient prophecies of the liberation of Jerusalem were about to be fulfilled, and time and history as we knew it would come to an end. But for many of these people, the idea that the ultimate dynamic of history was the apocalyptic clash between pure Islam and the satanic forces of secular modernism seemed persuasive, given the state of the world.

It has been perceptively remarked that the only thing more frightening than the idea that everything is connected is the idea that nothing is. The existence of a governing dynamic of history, wherever it comes from, whether promising or threatening, is in the end more comforting than the idea of history as disconnected and entirely contingent. If we can believe that what is going on in Ukraine, or Gaza or Syria now was “planned,” and that there is some force in control of it, then it is at least theoretically possibile that these crises can be brought to an orderly conclusion, even if it isn’t one we want.

Such an approach is not without its difficulties, of course. If a “Deep State” or any other mysterious entity has “planned” the events of the last five years, then the plan “all along” must have included defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan, which seems a little curious. And indeed in the case of Ukraine, I have read pundits suggesting “this was all planned” since the beginning, and with every new disaster and every new NATO failure, the same pundits claim that “now we can see what the real plan was,” until, through endless repetition, they just make themselves look ridiculous. But the alternative—a total, disorganised shambles from the beginning—implies a chaotic and contingent view of the world that many find unattractive, if not actually frightening.

This can easily become a coping mechanism, designed to comfort us that crises around the world are proceeding according to rules we can understand and under the influence of people we can identify, rather than according to rules that we don’t understand and towards outcomes where our influence is very limited. Thus, it has even been argued somewhat desperately that the chaos in Libya today must have been “planned,” although chaos is the last thing that Great Powers and Empires have historically wanted, and the Libyan chaos has had many bad consequences for the West. But that’s where a rigid scheme of interpretation will eventually take you. The alternative—a West surprised by the Arab Spring, wanting to avoid repeating the mistakes made in Tunisia, thinking Gaddafi was about to fall, and wanting to claim credit with the pro-western democratic regime that was bound to follow in a resource-rich Libya—may be true, as even a cursory perusal of the media at the time confirms, but it’s far less comforting.

But I think that there is another factor operating as well. We live in an era when public confidence in political leaders and in the government structures that support them has dropped to floor level, and is still going down. There are a number of different ways of dating public recognition of the utter uselessness of the western political class in different countries. The non-reaction to the financial crisis of 2008 is one. In Britain, the tragicomic self-harming episode of the Brexit negotiations was a key moment perhaps, in France the non-Presidency of François Hollande (2012-17) following the cheaply sordid reign of Sarkozy (2007-12). But in any event, no western political system was left standing after the catastrophic mishandling of the Covid crisis, and of the crisis in Ukraine that followed. So it seems evident that we are governed by imbeciles, doesn’t it, and that those imbeciles have hollowed out and destroyed the capacity of the states that support them in office?

Well, up to a point, because the idea that we are governed by imbeciles is actually quite disturbing. And the idea that these same imbeciles have so weakened and hollowed out the capacity of the state that replacing them with competent politicians wouldn’t be enough to cure the problem is even worse. Can we not fantasise that, behind the cretins who parade in public with coloured badges saying things like “President,” “Foreign Minister” and so forth, there is actually another layer, made up of people you don’t see, people who know what they are doing? Admittedly we can’t identify them, we have no idea who they might be or where they are to be found, but wouldn’t it be comforting if they actually existed? We might call them … the “Deep State.” After all, isn’t it better to have a Deep State than no state at all? And that, I think, is a large part of the attraction of the concept. Better a malign management of the affairs of the world than no management at all.

There are two other issues I want to deal with before talking about practical questions relating to the state. One is the continuity of collective purpose. The objective of modern western political parties is to be in power, and to enjoy the fruits of that power and the business opportunities that will follow. This means that, even when parties are in power for long periods of time, they seldom consciously pursue long-term policies, as different factions compete for power and various personalities decide to cash in their chips after a few years in high-profile jobs. Under the Prime Ministership of Tony Blair, for example, the political unit of account was not five years, or a year, or even a month, but a day, and the constant objective was to “win the day” in the media and especially online. Yet even so, there were inevitably elements of continuity, not only over that period, but between governments of different parties.

Thus, after the Second World War, the British establishment considered Britain was, and should remain, a Great Power. This very loose objective crossed party lines, and was first intended to be achieved through the Empire. By the mid-1950s, the cost of this policy had become prohibitive, and the retreat from Empire began. The shock of Suez only strengthened the recognition that Great Power status had to be ensured some other way, and by the late 1960s the focus of British governments was firmly on Europe, NATO and the United States. Possession of national nuclear weapons, permanent membership of the Security Council, a close and influential relationship with the United States, a powerful position within NATO and a cautious move in the direction of Europe became the new orthodoxy, not because some inner cabal decreed it, but because it was the only practicable way forward then, and it remains essentially the only practicable option now. Successive governments have recognised this, just as they have recognised that status in the world is something you objectively have, and you can’t just decide not to have it any more.

A more extreme version of the same process happened in France, after the humiliation of the Second World War and the loss of Indochina and Algeria. Across the political spectrum, there was a determination to rebuild an independent status for France, and this led to the development of an independent nuclear force, an independent intelligence capability outside the Anglo-Saxon-led community, withdrawal from the Integrated Military Structure of NATO, a dominant role in the EU and many other things. At least until the 1990s, you could talk to a French diplomat, journalist, businessman, military officer or academic about some strategic issue, and they would say something like “well now, our position…” The twin malevolent impacts of Brussels and neoliberalism have done a lot to undermine this commonality of purpose, but it’s still just about visible.

Collective purpose is a feature of many other societies as well, even if our aggressively individualistic and competitive political culture finds this hard to understand. The rebuilding of Japan after World War 2, the rise of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, all depended on an elite consensus across political factions and the educated middle classes about what needed to be done. Whilst political power in Japan is held and operates in ways that are deeply obscure to most foreign observers, the broad outlines of policy did not change very much over long periods of time. This elite consensus does not usually require complicated explanations: in Germany after World War 2 for example, the priority was to reestablish the country as an acceptable partner in world affairs after the embarrassment of the 1933-45 period. In practice, this meant being a faithful member of NATO and the EEC, a faithful ally of the United States and having armed forces with no capacity to operate outside national territory.

Anglo-Saxon states, as you would expect, pride themselves on their pragmatism and seldom realise that they are acting in much the same way. To them, it seems “common sense” . But as the years go by, even the most pragmatic policy starts to acquire a weight of inertia that resists change: indeed, as a general rule, the role of sheer inertia in politics is greatly underestimated. One of the problems, certainly, is institutional conservatism: people are used to doing things one way, and don’t necessarily welcome radical departures. But more important is the simple fact that the longer a policy is in operation, the pragmatically harder it is to change, or even to conceive of something to change it to.

So at the end of the Cold War, the future of NATO was very unclear, and many of its larger states were themselves uncertain what to do. In London, a few of us thought that this was a good time to start to play a major role in European defence questions, and put much less emphasis on the US link. We were not important enough to have any influence over the debate, but in any event, the world was falling apart around our ears then, and there were enough day-to-day crises already, without a major new initiative that might in the end lead nowhere. NATO itself carried on, as I’ve pointed out before, more because there was no possibility of a agreement on any other option, than because anyone would have come up with an organisation like NATO in 1990-91 using a clean sheet of paper.

This is why Opposition parties full of bright ideas often fail to change very much, because those ideas are only half-formed. Especially if they have been out of government for a while, and more especially if they have fashioned their policies for maximum public relations effect and electoral impact, they can be very surprised to confront a host of practical and often legal problems that they had never expected, nor even thought about. There are occasions when a reforming government can simply batter its way through—the post-1945 Labour government in Britain is an example—but circumstances have to be very special for that to happen.

It follows from this that if you have been working in government for decades, seen it all, done it all, and maybe seen the failure of previous attempts to change things, you will be wearily sceptical of yet one more, no matter how inherently logical and even persuasive it may seem. Even the most professional and cooperative bureaucratic class will feel bound to point out the likely problems, and if the running is in fact made not by elected politicians, but by “advisers” and consultants, whose future may depend on a given initiative being implemented, the result can be a real mess. With the best will in the world, it’s hard to react sympathetically and creatively to the nth attempt to do the same thing and hope it will succeed this time. Government officials are—and have to be in a democratic system—rather like lawyers or accountants in this respect.

At its worst though, this can slide into a type of weary arrogance, not helped in recent decades by the catastrophic decline in the quality of the western political class, and the shallow ambition and the lack of scruples that they have displayed. In addition, long-term government employees have a wealth of experience and knowledge that newcomers simply cannot have, by definition. It’s often a great surprise to them to discover the gulf of knowledge and understanding that exists between outsiders and insiders, even on quite banal subjects. It’s easy enough for a pundit or an opposition politician to wave a photograph or share a thirty-second video on social media, yelling “something must be done, the government must act.” But even a medium-sized government has access to an order of magnitude more information than the general public, from its own sources, from friendly countries, from international organisations, from coverage in the regional media and many other places. Of course, some or all of this information may be contradictory, incomplete or even wrong, and it doesn’t necessarily follow that governments will make the right judgements: they may also be tempted to conceal or downplay things that would be embarrassing. But ultimately, governments have access just to so much more and more varied information than the average person that, unless you’ve experienced it, you’d find it hard to believe.

Now of course this is a relatively ”pure” presentation of the situation, and in most countries there are further complicating factors that tend to keep things on the same line, ranging from political differences within governments to outside economic and political pressures, to foreign pressure, to sheer corruption and nepotism. But the point remains that, even in the most blamelessly democratic system, there are objective factors usually related to inertia that tend to keep policies going in roughly the same direction, until some overwhelming countervailing force arrives. It is this, rather than the manoeuvring of cabals, that explains why governments tend to follow the same direction most of the time.

It also encourages groupthink among nations. It’s seldom worth wasting time and effort gratuitously picking a fight with another state just because you don’t like something they are saying or doing: you may need their own help or agreement to something very soon. There are many international organisations around the world where unanimity on major issues is an end in itself: for the African Union or the Arab League, for example, the fear is always of public splits being exploited by ill-disposed powers.

The second issue, much more briefly, is the difference between aspirations and plans. The first is easy, the second is much more difficult. In any political system, there will be divisions of opinion that sometimes find their way out into the world. There will also be any number of pundits and opinion formers, who may or may not have influence, and who may one day find themselves in positions of power. The result is that in any reasonably large state, you can find practically all shades of opinion and ideas for new policies expressed somewhere, if you look hard enough. In the case of the gargantuan, carnivorous, poorly-coordinated US system, this is virtually certain. Any bizarre policy currently pursued by Washington has almost certainly been suggested by some pundit five years ago, and quite possibly by some unconnected pundit five years before that, and some other unconnected pundit some years before even that. Because the policy is presumably controversial, critics will make great efforts to trace it back in history, and will be content once they have found our pundits, who may be quite unaware of each other’s existence, and entirely without influence anyway.

So in certain parts of the world, it’s common to be approached by someone clutching a grubby photocopy of an article from the 1990s, and dealing with a current subject, let’s say the war in Gaza, and saying “look, look, you see, all this was carefully planned twenty-five years ago!” And this is the fundamental inability to distinguish between collective aspirations and collective plans. So at the time of writing, western states are doing victory laps to celebrate the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. But whilst there have been long-term aspirations in the West to see Assad fall, the West has been able to do little about it in practice. The weakness of his own regime and its forces, the weakness of Hezbollah and Iran and the willingness of Turkey to get involved are the essential reasons why Assad fell. Western aspirations may eventually have been satisfied, but through the actions of others. Correlation dies not equal causation. Indeed, the neo-conservative plan for the Middle East, of stable pro-US market democracies, is probably the most catastrophic failure to turn aspirations into reality since 1945.

A specific case that has caused a lot of confusion is the 2019 RAND corporation Report on “Extending Russia.” I have seen it argued that the very existence of this report demonstrates that there has been a long-term policy to do the various things it recommends, including further arming Ukraine. A moment’s thought, however, suggests that the opposite is true. Since the report tries to analyse Russian weaknesses and suggest ways to exploit them, it recommends measures which are not currently being taken, otherwise there would be no need for the report. Yes, the report reveals a dangerous and unhealthy attitude among parts of the US punditocracy, but we have no means of knowing what status the report had, who, if anybody read it, and whether it had any influence on policy.

Against that background, and with a few misunderstandings perhaps cleared up, what can we say about the substance? First, let’s look at the way that nations are administered

Even the smallest kingdoms were too large for one individual to rule, so helpers were needed, and these helpers had to be trustworthy. Often they were members of the ruler’s family, but it soon became necessary to appoint outsiders to the more routine posts. They were usually unpaid, and would seek to become rich through extortion and corruption, whilst taking care to do the job just well enough to avoid falling from favour. They were recruited and retained primarily for their loyalty, and those who were overly ambitious might come to a sticky end. In turn, they would exercise the power of patronage over many junior posts. In most European countries, the sources of wealth were rents from land and taxes and duties of different kinds, and politics was about the competition to secure access to these revenues, and then distribute them in such a way as to maintain and increase your power. (Yes, that does sound like parts of Africa, not to mention the Syrian Arab Army: but it’s a stage all states go through.)

What changed in Europe was the progressive development of an educated middle class, which demanded at least a minimally functional state. In the circumstances recruitment through patronage and remuneration through corruption were evidently not enough, and as the middle class increased its power, it looked more and more to professionalism, which in turn required education and training. So starting in Britain, the late nineteenth century saw the development of professional government systems, recruiting, training and promoting staff according to objective criteria. The system was more successful in some countries than others, and more subject to political influence in some countries than others, but essentially there was agreement that what was needed was a full-time, professional, trained cadre of officials not beholden to political parties, but administering the country neutrally. However imperfectly, this was the system developed in Europe, and subsequently copied in countries such as Japan.

If you think about it, it is the only way that a democracy can function. Imagine that your tax returns were scrutinised by someone brought in off the street because they were a protégé of a friend of a protégé of a friend of the new political leader. Imagine further that at the top of that tree was a political favourite with strong views on an emotive subject—abortion, perhaps, or assisted suicide—and that the tax code was used to attack people that person saw as enemies. Which is why, in a democracy, we have professional government services, staffed by people who make their careers there.

And a corollary of this is that sometimes such people have to tell the political leadership that they can't have what they want. This may be for legal reasons, or because it goes against an international agreement of some kind, or simply because it's impossible. The mark of a functioning democracy, paradoxically, is that the elected government doesn't always get its own way. But this requires an independent government service with a strong culture and high morale, and neoliberalism has been steadily eating away at both for more than a generation now.

A properly functioning system requires a careful balance between restraining the desires of the political class to do things that are illegal or impossible on the one hand, and preventing elected governments from carrying out their mandates on the other. Recently, the balance has shifted in the direction of the politicians, essentially through the politicisation of higher level government jobs, and the increasing influence in all countries of "advisers", whose political future depends on that of their boss.

However, especially in the more sensitive areas of government—defence, foreign policy, intelligence, law and order—this runs into a powerful sense of inertia, and often a belief that long-term professionals know what they are doing, and would like to be left alone to do it. This is inevitable: if you have been reading diplomatic telegrams and intelligence reports about a crisis for months or even years about a crisis in a country where you were once stationed, you are bound to consider yourself an expert, not least because you have access to sources that others don't. It's a small step, though, from that certainty to a kind of arrogance where you resist attempts to reach other conclusions or do things differently. This is the essence of the problem which people who talk about "Deep Sates" are trying to describe, and it's pretty much endemic in the government of a complex society.

Ironically, the country most often cited in this debate—the United States—is the one where there is probably the least sense of common purpose of any major western state. The US government system is notoriously balkanised, and consensus on any subject is extremely difficult. So the question “what is US policy on X?” often meets with a shrug of the shoulders, and the response “which one?” Organisations like the Pentagon and the CIA are notorious for having their own foreign policies for example, or even several: it’s not known to find teams from different parts of the US defence structure in the same country at the same time, doing different and even conflicting things, without either of them realising it.

So a society without a “Deep State” in this sense would be in trouble: indeed, it couldn’t function. But it seems to me that a term invented to describe the use of power in opaque and centralised political systems has very little utility in helping us understand our own chaotic, increasingly dysfunctional and personalised political systems and how they behave today. There is, of course, a very human preference for order rather than chaos, and we instinctively invent patterns to help us give a structure to the world: psychologists even have a name for it: apophenia. RV Jones, one of Churchill’s scientific advisers and an intelligence officer in World War 2, actually proposed (tongue in cheek) a scientific law to describe the phenomenon:

“No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated.”

He was lecturing to science students, but his point—that we will do anything to avoid Occam’s Razor being employed—has validity everywhere. We might also invoke Karl Popper: the “Deep State” hypothesis can never be falsified, because its proponents can always retreat to deeper and deeper layers and more and more complicated, if coherent, explanations. And in the end, an explanation that resists challenges by becoming more and more complicated and proposing more and more layers of complexity, isn’t an explanation at all.

By a quirk of the YouTube algorithm, I was recently watching a documentary about the allegation that Paul McCartney was killed in a car crash in 1966, and his place taken by a double, so that the lucrative Beatles business could continue. I remember this vaguely from the time, and I had thought that it had all been forgotten about. But no, there is a thriving Internet community discussing the “evidence” for this theory, which powerful but mysterious forces don’t want you to see, and the many ‘clues” the Beatles left in their later recordings. Those who are convinced that McCartney is still with us are “naive” and “afraid to challenge the established narrative” and so confront the mysterious dark forces involved. Did you know the Deep State was responsible for the death of John Lennon? A surprising number of people apparently do. Makes sense when you think about it.

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